[TuringTest]

Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape.

It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate

[zahlman]

That was 2014, not 2012; and I was trying not to mention it.

[TuringTest]

You're right, I mistyped it.

[FiveOhThree]

> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture

Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.

[amiga386]

GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having his cart confiscated.

That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.

[Levitz]

Basically Wikipedia has a failure point in which if media creates a narrative that's what passes as valid.

[thunderfork]

I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page.

Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".

[bigstrat2003]

I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".

[acdha]

It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.

[zahlman]

> from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.

There was no such moment in the first place.

[acdha]

It all started with his post, attacking her relationship with Grayson, who never reviewed her games. Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious but that did nothing to stop the attacks – if you look at the threats she received or the online statements the attackers made, they cared a LOT more about her alleged infidelity or what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.

This was later added to his post:

> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.

He even told Boston Magazine that this was the hook he used to get attention, with what he knew was a high likelihood of attacks:

> As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.”

> One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent.

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/2/

[thunderfork]

How would you characterize the initial blog post?

[FiveOhThree]

Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.

[Levitz]

Funny enough, it would the movement stopped being about harassing women the moment the media stopped writing about it, advocates kept on going, criticizing ideological push into videogames to this day. At the same time by now both Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian have been shown to be grifters who really knew jackshit but how to play a crowd.

[zahlman]

I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.

[bakugo]

The GamerGate article is probably the best example of Wikipedia's blatant political bias.

There are many biased articles out there, of course, but not many manage to misrepresent past events to such an extreme that it borders on comical. It reads like it was written by Zoe Quinn herself. Maybe it was.

[acdha]

GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.

The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.

[FiveOhThree]

Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.

[acdha]

If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really organic.

[FiveOhThree]

That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.

[acdha]

GamerGate wasn’t doing that work and they distracted mightily from it. For example, the much-hated Kotaku was actually doing reporting which got them black listed so not only was GamerGate not contributing there, they were actually harming the people who were:

https://kotaku.com/a-price-of-games-journalism-1743526293

Even if they had also been involved, it would not excuse the abusive behavior.

[zahlman]

Sigh. Well, now that it's come up....

Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.

I'm pretty sure I've even had this happen on HN.

[thunderfork]

GG wasn't constrained to Gjoni, it was the reaction to his posting. One guy saying "I'm on this team" does not define the characteristics of the resulting events.

[zahlman]

You miss the point. It's about those people being misinformed, unwilling to look into matters independently, and selective in the application of their supposed ideological principles.

[thunderfork]

Does "someone doesn't know trivia about the inflection point" really demonstrate any of those things?

Like, if I asked you whether the anger at Depression Quest was downstream of a long-standing meme-feud on /v/ about whether visual novels are videogames and you didn't know that, that doesn't really mean anything about your understanding of anything other than /v/ culture wars of the 2010s.

I mean, c'mon, "five guys burgers and fries"?

The whole thing springs out of "someone who made a thing we don't like" and "an excuse to attack" - the lack of any actual ethical breaches in the coverage of Depression Quest should be immediately disqualifying.

[zahlman]

Among other things, I think it suggests that my opinion about what happened, as someone who does know those things from distinctly remembering them and having had them be personally relevant at the time, should be taken more seriously than that of people telling me over a decade later what happened based on some combination of { the Wikipedia article, their own worldview, what their friends have said about it, more recent news articles from aggrieved people who cite it as part of a grand conspiracy theory about contemporary right-wing politics }.